


solder my heart back into my frame

by KathrynShadow



Category: League of Legends
Genre: Angst, Developing Relationship, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Past Relationship(s), Slow Build, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Viktori, but then it's Viktor so what else is new
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-10
Updated: 2014-09-10
Packaged: 2018-02-16 21:52:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2285697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KathrynShadow/pseuds/KathrynShadow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Orianna has not been laid to rest, her body made anew without her consent. A corpse walks Piltover on softly ticking legs.</p><p>And <em>Viktor</em> is said to be a mad scientist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	solder my heart back into my frame

**Author's Note:**

> -write monster oneshot wherein the Institute and the Summoners are mentioned a bajillion times  
> -"sup guys, we're rebooting canon, the Institute isn't a thing anymore"  
> -too lazy to edit oneshot to reflect that  
> -wheeeeeee
> 
> Title taken from "Royal One" by Carbon Leaf.

If Orianna’s father were not already dead, Viktor would kill him for this.

When he sees her for the first time, he laughs. He laughs until even the machinery of his chest hurts, not just its remaining flesh; he laughs until his eyes burn in their sockets, until his mouth aches, until he doesn’t know the difference between laughing and sobbing.

This… _being_ is a clockwork caricature, a desecrated grave given a parody of mechanical life. Orianna has not been laid to rest, her body made anew without her consent. A corpse walks Piltover on softly ticking legs.

And _Viktor_ is said to be a mad scientist.

* * *

She is, at least, a good fake. He’ll give Corin that much credit. Observing her, he can see his Ori in the way she holds herself, in the curious tilt of her head and the graceful arch of her spine.

But she walks like a predator on the hunt, each footstep firm and deliberate, a delicate prowl–and when she dances, there is no emotion in her eyes. And the worst–the worst part is that he knows with absolute certainty that he could have done _better._ With her permission, he could have brought her back exactly as she was, the same soul in a stronger body. If he had known. If he had been there.

If Corin had _told_ him. Their own differences aside, Corin had to have known that Viktor would have burned his own laboratory to the ground before he would hurt Orianna.

_“Nothing good ever came out of Zaun, Ori.”_

_“He did, Father,” her voice so firm in its defence of him. He doesn’t want to remember it anymore._

Viktor doesn’t need to meet her to know that she was botched, that he hates every tick, tick, ticking _fragment_ of her.

Of course, he ends up meeting her anyway.

* * *

“You are Blitzcrank’s creator,” comes a voice, and something soft and wet lurches in Viktor’s chest.

He makes no move but to turn his eyes, hidden behind his mask. The clockwork facsimile stands beside him, her empty gaze intent on the metal hiding his face. Her voice is almost _exact_ , only a hollow echo betraying its nature; he thinks that if he looks away, he could forget even that, if he wanted.

He doesn’t look away.

And then her words sink in a little– _I am not,_ the instinctive response bitter in his throat, but he swallows it down. The only person who acknowledges his work on that front is Blitzcrank himself…

Viktor needs to have a talk with him over who is and is not proper material for a friend.

Her eyebrows dip ever so slightly, the corners of her mouth curling down in confused annoyance. There are so many minuscule joints in her face, Viktor realises now; Corin must have destroyed his fingers making her eyes alone. (A pity he did not exert a similar level of effort for her mind.)

“Viktor,” she says.

He feels like he is bleeding, and resolves to check his seams later. The prosthetics looked like they had merged with the flesh with only some scarring, but perhaps something has torn. It wouldn’t be the first time.

“That is the Ball’s name,” she says.

He had resolved not to speak a word to her, but that statement shocks him so that he hears his voice before he realises he is replying. “Corin hated me,” he scoffs. “Why would he give my name to your protector?” He spits out the last, the word acid on his tongue.

A rapid, rhythmic clicking resounds from her neck as she tilts her head at him, her eyes widening just a fraction as her expression clears. “Father did not name the Ball,” she says. “I did.”

 _She remembers me?_ Viktor hates himself for the thought, hates himself for the tiny wad of absurd _hope_ that tries to unfold, especially when–

“I do not know why,” the creature says, shifting her weight with small, precise movements. “Who are you?”

His chest aches. “Ask Jayce,” Viktor growls. “He will give you a better account, I’m sure.” He turns on his heel and stalks away, not quickly enough to miss her parting words:

“Shall we be friends?”

When he returns to his laboratory, he cuts his chest open and replaces the final few parts of his ribcage. His last bone ribs hurt when he snaps them off; the new ones feel nothing at all. Much better.

Viktor throws his human parts in the trash. He has no use for them.

* * *

“Your father does not like me.”

Blitzcrank clunks loudly as he tries to shrug. “NO,” he agrees. “HE DOES NOT.”

“Why?” Orianna frowns at the trees. “I have done nothing to him.” Outside of battle, that is–but Blitzcrank has fought Viktor too and they are still on good terms. It stands to reason that this would be no different.

A particularly violent burst of steam hisses out as the golem contemplates her question. “I DO NOT KNOW,” he says, eventually. “PERHAPS IT IS NOT YOU.”

She considers this. She considers the Ball, how it caught her when she forgot to wind herself and the name had floated into her mind like a ghost. She considers how Viktor refused to look at her for too long even before she tried to speak to him.

She considers his words about her father.

She considers how very, very little she knows about herself, and she thinks she might understand.

* * *

Orianna is without the Ball. It’s only for a short time–three days, just long enough for Heimerdinger to satisfy his curiosity and fabricate some blueprints–but it’s enough for someone to try to take advantage of her.

She doesn’t expect it. She isn’t on friendly terms with many of her fellow Champions, and the folk outside of the League are wary of even the most harmless creatures inside it–let alone things like her. She has no one to warn her–of mercenaries, of gangs trying for bragging rights, of assassins looking to remove a rival faction’s Champion–that the danger does not end when the battles do.

The street is empty, but bright in the afternoon sun. Her feet click on the cobblestones as she prowls, inquisitive eyes glancing into each window, but each window is shuttered.

(Windows are usually shuttered when unfamiliar Champions walk outside of the Institute, but Orianna doesn’t know that.)

She can hear them before she sees them, of course. Muffled breaths, the soft sounds of their fluttering little hearts. But she is used to people avoiding her, so it does not occur to her to think “ambush” until they burst out of hiding.

There are twenty-three of them, hooded and masked, holding weapons as widely varied as the build of their bearers. It does not occur to Orianna to be nervous; she reaches for the Ball, and–

…oh, she thinks.

If they believe that she is helpless by herself, they are quickly and terribly proven wrong. The moment the first one–a small, skinny, man with a pair of small, skinny knives–makes a move for her, she skips to the side; she spins on one slender foot, reaching under her chest for her bladed gears, flicking her hand out in a smooth motion. The man makes a muted sound and falls, soft and bleeding in the street. He lets one of his daggers fall with a clatter, holding his hand against his throat. The gear sticks out between his fingers, garish gold against the purplish crimson of deep blood. It is too late for pressure on the wound to save his life. Does he not understand?

After that, they move together. They do not seem particularly surprised or upset by the death of their comrade–seasoned fighters, she thinks. Perhaps he was new to their group? Perhaps there was some signal that he neglected to follow?

Orianna spins and hops and dashes. Her blades hiss as they fly, her gears click as she dances. A woman with a club falls. Her head falls a second later. A man with a bow, the sack of his stomach slashed wide by a gear he almost dodged, stumbling back as his own intestines slip against his fingers. Perhaps that one will live, she thinks. She tumbles in a somersault under a young mage’s spell, snatching her blade from the gasping form of the first man. His throat sprays her with a quick splatter of gore, but there is not enough blood left for much more than that, and the rest begins to pulse onto the street in an ever-slowing throb. The mage dodges, but in doing so condemns the disembowelled archer.

Corpses, or near enough. A second mage, too old to dodge her. A solemn girl with a longsword who can’t be more than seventeen. A man, nearly as wide as he is tall and seemingly all muscles, screaming more than them all.

Orianna is not helpless. But she was built with the Ball in mind, and without it, she is so much more susceptible to luck.

The young mage catches her in the back. Her voice shatters, the remaining fighters swarm her, and she falls to pieces.

She expects to awaken in the Institute. Instead, Orianna opens her eyes to a scorched lab and a turned back.

She blinks in surprise. All of her is in perfect working order, every part put back just where it was. The blood has been cleaned off of her gears; some of them, she notes, have even been slightly oiled, and no longer tick as loudly as they did. She was not even aware that they needed such attention.“You do not like me,” she states.

“He should have built you better,” Viktor says tightly, and leaves.

* * *

He shouldn’t have brought her back. The Summoners were notoriously possessive of their playthings; even if Orianna had been mortal, they would have found a way to repair the damage that had been done. (They had an awful lot of practice undoing death, after all–as long as you had been accepted into the League. Summoners didn’t do charity work.) As it was… well, they needn’t have even used a lick of magic, if they didn’t mind the extra time; her techmaturgy was woven into every component of her, so she only needed reassembly to reawaken.

He _shouldn’t_ have brought her back. By all rights, he shouldn’t have even known she needed it; he practically stumbled across the information that she was without her Ball, and he had been so close to just rolling what was left of his eyes and waiting for the inevitable Journal article on her stupidity, but–but–

(But the last time someone else had tried to bring Orianna back, she turned into this.)

It was idiotic, but it was distracting Viktor from his work. It would be much faster if he just gave in, found out where she was, made sure she was safe. Or not. Either way, knowing for sure would remove the tense little questions that kept messing up his calibrations.

So he had left his lab. Hard-learned paranoia meant that he already had enough information to start with–the off-duty locations of the other Champions, their habits, their interests. Orianna lived on the premises of the Institute proper, but she liked walking through the surrounding city. He had spies everywhere–mechanical, human, acolyte–and a few of them had spotted her, knew which direction she went that day.

Finding her was one thing. Following her was quite another. _Retrieving_ her…

Viktor didn’t care to know why they had wanted her–or if they had even wanted her specifically at all, rather than just waiting for any old Champion to show weakness outside of the Summoners' protection. He didn’t… care… at all. But when he caught sight of the (much smaller, now) band, limping and wincing and cradling bleeding parts, dismantling that shining chassis in the centre of a ring of corpses, he… he…

Viktor was not a murderer–not a permanent one, anyway. The gravity device would run out of power in a few hours without the Summoners there to shorten its duration in the name of “balance”. Presumably they would be located before then.

…Caitlyn would probably stick her nose into this, Piltoverian that Orianna was. _Damn_ it.

All of this, every second, had been a mistake. Viktor _liked_ being under the radar, he liked how rarely his services were called upon in the Fields, he liked not being a source of speculation beyond “I wonder how many test subjects he has locked up in there”. (The answer was none, of course. He has enough problems without results being skewed or data being known by unwilling participants, thank you.)

What was _wrong_ with him? He thought he had fixed this. Hadn’t he fixed this? Everyone who knew him before agreed that Viktor was no longer the man he used to be–was no longer a man at all–he still had his resentment, but that had provided his drive, he doesn’t mind keeping that memento, but his other emotions–everything is gone. He had taken them, _defeated_ them, remade himself without them, so that they could not hurt him anymore.

Hadn’t he?

* * *

Heimerdinger apologises in his own rambling, deceptively airheaded way. It takes five minutes. Orianna tilts her head, amused, revolving in slow pirouettes while the Ball hovers protectively around her. She feels better with it, certainly, but she… misses Viktor’s soot-stained workshop, somehow. It’s a curious sensation, and not one she has clearly felt before.

“Viktor put me back together again,” she tells him.

The yordle gives her a sharp look. “Hmm,” he says, but doesn’t go on.

“He does not like me.”

Heimerdinger muses on that for a second. “You _are_ mechanical,” he offers. “But you would have been retrieved… hmm.” He looks… not troubled. Interested, perhaps concerned, but in a strangely light way–like he was worried about something much worse than what currently bothers him, but he isn’t yet at ease. Orianna catalogues the emotion carefully. It’s been so long since she’s seen a new one.

“He is protective of me,” Orianna says. It’s only half a question–she’s very sure of it, she just doesn’t know why his behaviour is so… split.

“Yes,” Heimerdinger agrees thoughtfully. “Perhaps you should ask him yourself.”

* * *

“You knew me,” is how Orianna breaks the relative silence.

Viktor tries not to grit his teeth behind his mask. He shouldn’t have worried about how the _other_ champions would react to his sudden bout of needless charity, as it turned out; the only consequence to come from his “rescue” was that, apparently, Orianna herself now felt that she was welcome.

In his workspace.

 _Regularly,_ and without warning.

If he pretends not to hear, perhaps she’ll go away, he thinks desperately.

“Were we friends?”

“ _No,_ ” he nearly growls, the half-lie sour in his throat.

Orianna tilts her head and it’s so _close_ to being right. “You were friends with the soft me?” she corrects.

(He hurts. He hurts, and he wants to–but–there’s nothing to lash out _at_ , not here, not that he wouldn’t just rebuild the next minute, and–)

Viktor’s hand flutters over the space of table where his jeweller’s screwdrivers should be, but they aren’t there. That’s right, he’d been working on–so they were–

Before he can get up to cross the room, Orianna places the little box of miniature tools in his hand. Their fingers touch, just for a second, and he expects to flinch away–but behind his gloves he can’t feel the difference between metal and flesh, and if he just closes his eyes and forgets the _ticking_ , he can…

“We are the same,” Orianna tells him in that quietly serious lilt that he remembers so, so much.

Finally, at that, Viktor jerks away. “You are _not._ ”

Orianna blinks, her neck taking a thousand tiny movements just to turn her head a few degrees to the side (it should have been fluid, Viktor could have made it perfect, indistinguishable). “No,” she corrects him. “You and I are the same. We are metal things.”

When his throat opens enough to speak, his own volume makes him start. “I _chose_ this!” he shouts, and it rasps pathetically even through the mechanised echo of his voicebox. “You were torn out of your grave before your flesh had time to cool–”

She looks so small, confused. “I did not choose to–” a pause, a thought–“evolve?”

Viktor’s blood flashboils. “This,” he grates, snapping a hand out to indicate Orianna’s new form, “is not evolution. This is–desecration.”

He didn’t realise she had the capacity to look shaken. He almost wants to know what managed to disturb her, the facts or their delivery, but he doesn’t trust himself to speak.

“Then why would you not destroy me?” she asks.

The silence is heavy, thick, suffocating. Viktor rocks backwards an inch, but it doesn’t help him breathe. He _feels_ , and he realises with a crippling horror that it isn’t sudden, it isn’t a glitch or a particularly bad day or even just his human brain trying to make sense of mechanical diagnostics. It isn’t sudden, because it has only ever been suppressed. It isn’t sudden, because he has just been lying, pretending, this whole time. It isn’t sudden, because he failed.

He failed. Inside, he is just too _human_ , even now. Even after all of this.

Viktor’s third arm hooks over his shoulder, pulls his mask up with a few faint hisses and clicks of disengagement. His first and second reach out–his right hand slips through the air where her waist should be, fumbles, settles on her hip instead–his left hand touches her face, her cheek, cupping the corner of her jaw.

He kisses her out of habit, out of desperation, out of a hopeless need for something–just, just one thing–to be the same as it was before.

She smells of metal and machine oil and magic, her lips cold and still on his.

Viktor steps back, stumbles in his haste to turn away, slam his mask back down and forget. He leans against his emptiest workbench, his breath quick and shallow and spinning.

He can’t speak to ask her to leave, but she understands all the same.

The air only comes back in the room when the door clicks shut behind her, and even then it smells faintly of empty caskets and rose perfume.

* * *

It takes Viktor a few matches, but he realises eventually that Orianna’s verbal musings no longer include the others' uneasiness around her. He almost feels guilty, but then he’s not sure if he _should_ ; he no longer knows how to tell whether she’s upset at the knowledge or content at having it at all. In her new state, it may have always been just a question to her, not a wound.

She doesn’t come back to the laboratory. It feels emptier than it should without her; he should be relieved at the departure of that distraction, but he can’t keep his mind still anymore. His… revelation about his experiment, the nature of his human brain and its human reactions even within a mostly-mechanised body, rattled him more than he expected.

Partly because Viktor no longer even has the stubborn denial anymore. Before, he could have written his discomfort off as frustration; he knows better now (now that he’s started falling prey even to human _impulses_ again).

He already has the plans sketched out, much of the hardware constructed, for a fully machine form. They’ve been there for a long time, really, but he wanted to hold off, to make sure that there was nothing useful his humanity granted before he gave it up.

Viktor has never been so certain before that being a human is terrible. Except… now he’s starting to doubt if being a robot is any better. Certainly it can’t be _worse_ , but Blitzcrank still has his share of issues, and Orianna…

He was so sure that her fascination with people in general (and him in particular) was simple curiosity. He can’t stop wondering, now, how much of it was loneliness.

Not that loneliness scares him anymore after this long, but…

But.

Perhaps Heimerdinger has a point. Perhaps he should stop short of a full conversion.

* * *

Orianna has always known when she isn’t wanted, but it hasn’t stopped her until now. She returns to her Institute quarters and stays there, but she feels that it should be more crowded. Viktor’s workspace was meticulously uncluttered, but it was still _full_. Orianna has a bed that she does not lie in, a closet she does not need, a table and chairs she has no use for, and the Ball. Nothing more. She never required more.

She misses his rooms. She misses his projects. Sometimes, in the dead of night when there is nothing else to occupy her, she thinks of the sensation of his mouth crashing against hers, and she finds herself somehow missing that too.

It had not been pleasant. It had not been painful, but it had been unexpected, indelicate, and far too short to react to. Orianna had not been sure at the time–had not been sure for several hours afterwards–what that reaction would have been.

She thinks she knows now.

Viktor’s lips were soft, she remembers. She expected his face to look like the rest of him; there were scars, to be sure, and his eyes were noticeably mechanical, but his mouth was untouched. It makes sense in retrospect, of course. Orianna only has the ability to talk through the magic holding her, the joins of her lips too small and flexible to be created through normal means. Viktor… He dabbles in techmaturgy, as he seems to dabble in everything, but much of his work is purely mechanical in nature. There was no _reason_ for him to go through the trouble of making a new mouth when his old one would do just as well.

(It was warm. Orianna hadn’t realised that she wasn’t.)

She paces her room, frowning at the floor. Had they been lovers before? It’s the only thing that makes sense to her–Viktor was careful with the relationships he had, conservative. She watched him interact with his fellow Zaunites and he was… civil, certainly, but distant even with those he occasionally worked alongside. He was friendly with Blitzcrank, but not demonstrative–not physically so. He _loathes_ Orianna–she… she thinks–and yet he kissed her. True, he seemingly startled himself as much as her, but it had happened all the same. He wouldn’t have even had the impulse if she–if the dead Orianna wasn’t close to him in that way, right?

Orianna… hopes that she was. And then she remembers that she, this her, this self, is not the one that Viktor knew, and the hope spoils all the same. It’s fascinating.

Being able to catalogue that emotion isn’t worth feeling it.

* * *

Viktor isn’t acting like himself. Orianna barely knows him, but something is… different–wrong? And Blitzcrank agrees, so it isn’t just her new interest corrupting her observations.

The inventor keeps _watching_ her. He doesn’t even make an effort to conceal it; Orianna isn’t sure he notices it at all. But it makes her… think. Wonder. Want.

She approaches him, finally, on one of her walks. She’s careful not to invade his laboratory, not until he gives her permission to enter, but he leaves the place far more often than he did; her self-imposed exile is less of an obstacle than she feared it would be.

It’s a warm morning, a morning for children, for the living. The sun is bright, but not painfully so, a few wisps of cloud blocking out just enough light to be comfortable. The Ball glitters. Every colour seems strangely vivid, even the dirt on the cobblestones looking somehow lively and cheerful.

The street where Viktor walks is still close to deserted. When Orianna joins him, it empties altogether. He looks so dreadfully out of place, dark clothing and harsh lines amidst all this colour and life, and it _bothers_ her.

“Why do they avoid you?” probably shouldn’t be the first thing out of her mouth when she falls into step beside him, but it is.

“Why do they avoid _you?_ ” he echoes. It is his answer, not a question.

It’s the wrong answer, Orianna thinks, puzzled. “I am undead,” she says. A new word; it seems apt, but he flinches like it hurts him. “You are still alive.”

Viktor hesitates, looks at the wall instead of her. “I am close enough,” he says. “They know I am human no longer.”

“Stranger things come from Zaun,” she objects. “Worse things.”

He looks at her. She wishes she could see his expression; his shoulders relaxed, just slightly, but she doesn’t know what that means. “More than we do elsewhere,” he agrees, not without humour. “But we are uncommon all the same.”

“You frighten them,” Orianna says, half to herself.

“Yes.” And he is still unreadable. She wants to see his face, wants to know what he is thinking, wants to make him better even if he isn’t unhappy.

She is angry, suddenly–there is blood on Viktor’s hands from the war machines he created, but there is blood on all of their hands now, isn’t there? The city that birthed Singed and Warwick fears Viktor as acutely as it fears them, and…

…and before he became a Champion, before he gained notoriety as the genius inventor he was, he had done no deliberate harm to anyone but himself.

Orianna stops walking. Viktor goes another step before he does the same, looking back at her.

“They shouldn’t,” she says. It seems right, somehow, to reach out to him, to touch his shoulder, his chin. Her hand follows a pattern that she doesn’t remember, slides up his jaw to stroke his hair; the strands interweave between her fingers and _he still can’t cut his hair evenly_ pops into her head from nowhere.

She can hear his heartbeat, so loud, because he stopped breathing. His voice is so small when he speaks. “Ori?” Viktor whispers, like a prayer.

He doesn’t mean her, so: “No,” she says. But she is still here, this is still what she wants.

Orianna lays her free hand on his chest, his heart thrumming against her fingers even through the metal that hides it. It’s fitting, she thinks, and for a second she almost understands the need for poetry.

She leans forward and up, presses a kiss to his mask, just over his lips.

His breath hitches, his hand twitching against her hip. His third arm moves, arching gracefully over his body, and Orianna moves back just in time for those slender metal fingers to grip the bottom edge of his mask and pull it up.

Viktor’s mouth is still soft, still warm. This time, the kiss is questioning.

This time, she returns it.


End file.
